in the passenger seat
by Louciferish
Summary: Same universe as "On The Run", but with Tony Stark/Dick Grayson as a pairing - In which there are costume changes, deep thoughts, and very, very shallow thoughts. Tony is bad at being a grown-up and Dick is a smooth operator.


Pepper didn't like Tony flying long distances in the suit at night, as though he'd run into a flock of geese in the dark or something. Even though that was preposterous (that one incident with the owl really didn't count) he usually held off and picked more mundane means of travel at night, because a happy Pepper was a Pepper who gave Tony slightly more credit for a day or two.

But tonight, Tony was tired, and he knew if he called Happy to drive down to D.C. to get him it would take so long that he'd be asleep before he even got in the car, and he really just wanted to peel out of the suit and drop onto his bed.

So instead Tony was flying through Gotham, winding his way between skyscrapers, headed back to New York, when he caught a familiar flash of yellow and green down below and suddenly didn't feel quite so exhausted. He dropped like a very bright, controlled stone onto the rooftop beside Robin.

"Dickie," he exclaimed happily, and caught the boy up in one of his patented Downright Painful Too-Tight Iron Man Hugs, and got a not even slightly painful but still surprising knee to his groin for his trouble.

"God dammit, put me down," the kid in his arms growled, twisting and trying to free his arms. "What are you, some kind of giant metal sicko? Fuckin' let me _go_."

Tony dropped him, and he landed in a crouch. "You're not Dick."

"What was your first clue, genius?"

"Where's Dick?"

"I don't know," the kid said, standing and brushing off his uniform like something on Tony was contagious. "Could be dead for all I care. Batman traded him in for a younger model." The smirk on his face looked wrong under the mask that had once matched Dick's grin. "A better model."

Younger? Tony stopped worrying about Dick and really _looked_ for a second, and it was sort of obvious this kid wasn't Dick, really. He was built differently. He was _bigger_ , stockier than Dick had been the last time Tony had seen him, and it was hard to tell (the mask, and Tony just generally not knowing much about teenagers) but he could pass for sixteen... but apparently probably wasn't and _Jesus_ , what the fuck was wrong with Bruce?

"Sorry," Tony stammered. "Sorry, I'll just... tell Batman I said hi? No, don't do that. I was never here. Sorry. Have... fun?"

And that was how Tony found himself perched on a rooftop on the outskirts of Gotham ten minutes later, legs dangling over the edge of the building. He was just too distracted to fly all the way back to New York, so instead he landed, and he sat, and the thought about Dick, and he thought about Peter Pan.

Tony had loved Peter Pan when he was a kid, when his first nanny used to read it to him, before Howard decided his son was ready to start school early and didn't need a caregiver. Peter Pan could fly, and Peter Pan would never grow up, never have responsibilities. He would always get to be a little boy, and to have fun, and who wouldn't want a life like that?

But Peter Pan was a dark story, too. The cartoon version had been too busy adding extra racism to show the worst part of Peter, which was that he forgot. At the end of the book, Peter remembered to visit Wendy less and less often. Tinkerbell and Captain Hook died, and Peter forgot them as well. He broke Wendy's heart, so caught up in himself and his new adventures that he forgot everything else.

The thing was, Tony hadn't seen Dick in two years now, and he hadn't even _realized_ that. Dick had come around all the time after that first weekend of "training", had bonded with Steve and told circus stories with Clint, and even Natasha liked him. And then at some point he'd stopped coming and Tony hadn't noticed, hadn't asked why, nothing.

And now Tony had asked Jarvis to scan recent news stories about Bruce and come up with... nothing. Nothing in the last year about Dick attending events with Bruce or getting honors at school or anything. Tony hadn't even noticed that Bruce had _adopted_ a new boy, this Jason kid who must be the new Robin, and _he didn't want to be this Peter Pan._

The motion detectors on the suit pinged right about the same time the voice came from behind him. "I've gotta say, you really stand out here. Not much Gotham architecture comes in crimson and gold."

The guy behind him had taken the idea of a pop of color to a whole new level, Tony thought, eyeballing the way the black suit seemingly seamlessly covered the man's entire body like a second skin before blooming into a pointed blue logo across his chest, reminiscent but not precisely something with wings. Tony's eyes drifted back down and caught on those perfectly-outlined calves.

"Huh," Tony said, turning back to the skyline. "I thought the Bat didn't like other heroes hanging around in Gotham. What are you trading him to hunt on his turf?"

"Oh, he lets me hang around free of charge," the guy said with an edge of humor. "Mostly. I heard you were looking for me, but I guess if you're more interested in scouting a location for a new Stark Industries tower I can leave you alone."

Tony shot up so fast he tumbled over the edge and had to catch himself and turn with the repulsors. He retracted the face plate on the suit. "Dick?"

The man on the roof nodded, grinning familiarly and then laughing as over 200 pounds of man and suit collided with his chest and then lifted him briefly into the air. "Oh my god," Tony said, putting Dick back on his feet and stepping back. "Okay, what are we calling this little number, 'Blue Bird'? Did you finally outgrow the little shorts?"

"Didn't you get a good enough look at me earlier?" Dick's voice was sly and yep, Tony was blushing. The _kid_ was making him blush. "It's Nightwing now, actually."

"I like it," Tony said. "Very tallish, dark, and handsome, but the blue bit is sort of wasted when you can't see how it matches your eyes through the mask." And that was better - Dick was blushing now too, so they were on more even footing. "So what's the story, Wishbone? Why the costume change?"

Dick shrugged, and flicked the lenses off on his mask. "I guess all those bad jokes I heard for years were right - you reach an age where you just don't want to wear bright green underwear and a blinding target-colored cape anymore. And Batman wasn't really into me going part-time on the whole crimefighter business while I went to college, so..."

"So he adopted some foul-mouthed, sixteen year-old brat instead? I guess you can't improve on the original."

"Robin's a good kid when you get to know him," Dick said. "And he's _fourteen_."

"So I read," Tony said wryly. "But my mind rebels against the idea of a kid that big being that fucking little. Isn't Robin supposed to be _nimble_ or something?"

"Robin I was nimble. Robin II can be whatever he's good at, which admittedly is not acrobatics."

"And Robin III?"

Dick just shook his head slowly, head down and eyes hidden. "I realize you don't always like what I do," he said. "But I'm an adult now, and looking back on those first years, when I was even younger than J- than Robin is right now... I wouldn't change a day of it. Except maybe the ones where I got tied to chairs."

Tony knew an Oscar moment when he saw one. This was where he made the big coming of age speech, obviously, so he reached out and put a hand on Dick's shoulder. "You're a good man," Tony started awkwardly. "You grew up into a very fine-" Dick had taken one big step into Tony's space and gee, he was just _right there_ now wasn't he, and Tony's arm was now draped all around his shoulders, which were very impressive, but he had a speech to make about a "Very fine young-"

"I'm glad you think I'm fine," Dick said breathily. "You're not too shabby yourself."  
"Okay," Tony said. "This is not where I thought this moment was going." Normally, Tony was pretty good at thinking on his feet, or at least with something on his lower half, especially when being propositioned, but all-grown-up Dick smirking at him on a rooftop was, wow, "Unexpected."

"I did learn stealth from the best," Dick said. "But I'm pretty sure the torch I was carrying could be seen _from space_."

"Well, I didn't see it the last time I was up there, but I was a little distracted by the time travelling insectoid aliens at the time."

"I know," Dick said. "I think you called me 'the kid' and 'kiddo' and variations of that enough times that I eventually got the message." His hips were cocked, his eyes were narrowed, and Tony hadn't been this intensely targeted for upfront seduction in a good number of years, really. The number was somewhere larger than one but less than four. It was a sliding scale, depending on whether the situation ratcheted up from here. "I don't think you can really call me 'kid' so easily anymore."

"No," Tony said, and his eyes were definitely still more in the vicinity of Dick's hips than they ought to be, damn it. "That might be a little too Nabokovian for me. Age play isn't really my thing."

"Don't worry, I was wearing both my socks when you met me."

Tony's laughter flirted with hysteria, but pulled back when he realized Dick's hand was on his waist now, or where he waist would be, and he _couldn't feel it through the armor_ and that was _wrong_. "I have rarely hated the armor this much," he muttered.

"Ditto," Dick said, and he kissed him.

Tony pushed him back. "You know that I'm like, fifty years older than you, right?"

"No, you're not," Dick said, and kissed him again.

Tony pushed him away again. "Well, look, you should know I'm sort of involved with-"

"Captain America, yeah, I caught that one. I'm young, not _blind_."

"No," Tony said. "That's Daredevil." And then he couldn't talk again because his mouth was full of tongue.

By the time Tony thought to protest again, Dick had walked him back firmly into the brick wall of the stairwell, and Tony had both hands in Dick's hair, and was really in no position to protest anything except his own idiocy in not anticipating this scenario in his schematics for the suit because Dick's body was pressed flush against him, and he had one hand on Tony's chest and the other on his hip and Tony still _couldn't feel anything_.

"This," Tony said, dropping his head onto Dick's (broad, muscled, yes) shoulder. "Is an exercise in futility."

"I'm noticing," Dick panted, twining his fingers through the short hair at the nape of Tony's neck. "You need to think about a costume redesign."

"Already got one," Tony quipped, leaning back and tapping his temple with one finger. "Don't take it personal, I always think about suit schematics when I'm... busy. Cap can't manage it either."

Dick smirked. "Maybe he needs a sidekick to help with that. I hear I'm pretty good at that." And okay, that fizzle was the sound of Tony's brain completely short-circuiting. Awesome. His eyes must have gone vacant too, because Dick just laughed and patted him on the head like a good kid, and hey, backwards. "Maybe you should think that one over a little, and give me a call," he said, then leaned in to slant his mouth over Tony's again, slowing and gentling the kiss before pulling away to whisper his number in Tony's ear and those digits might, in fact, have seared themselves into his skull.

"Don't wait two years this time, hm?" Dick said, then he launched a cable straight out to the next building and swung away, giving Tony a perfect view of his ass in the process, and yes, it was official, Tony Stark just got seduced by someone who for all he knew was still a member of a team called the _Teen_ Titans.

Being a superhero was awesome.


End file.
